New York this past week has been in the grips of an exhausting heat wave: the air is thick and humid, and every subway platform feels like a blast furnace. But at least we have comic relief. Jolted to life by the late entry of a pair of humiliated politicians, our once unremarkable city election has become fodder for tabloid covers and late-night entertainers. I’d have hoped for more from the New York Post, whose recent headlines – “Here We Ho Again!” for disgraced governor Eliot Spitzer and “Weiner’s Second Coming!” for disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner – lack a certain bite. But it’s better than nothing, and at least we don’t have to watch the Yankees.

So welcome, New York, to the Eliot and Anthony show: one busted by the FBI as Client 9 of a prostitution ring, the other brought low for sexting women he’d never met and posting an image of his briefs-clad, left-hanging erect penis to Twitter, each of them eating up airtime and column inches with their PR-honed acts of contrition. Weiner and his wife, the Hillaryland veteran Huma Abedin, have splashed their personal lives across the covers of several magazines. (They have a very nice kitchen.) Spitzer has done every TV show that’ll have him, from Charlie Rose to the MSNBC roster. He even popped up on the Tonight Show, which films in Los Angeles.

It’s working! Spitzer, who has gatecrashed the race for comptroller (basically, the city’s in-house auditor), is running away against Scott Stringer, a lesser-known candidate who has had to rely on his family friend Scarlett Johansson to get any exposure. Weiner has been doing well too, though not as convincingly. Although he topped at least one poll, this week he came up nine points behind the long-time frontrunner, Christine Quinn. Still, Weiner’s numbers – quickly swollen and then suddenly flaccid – may yet recover. As the Guardian’s Harry Enten points out, New York races tend to break late in the election cycle.

So what the hell is going on? It’s more than a little strange to see this pair surge in parallel, since they really have very little in common. Weiner, a middle-class boy from Brooklyn, married very well and ingratiated himself to the ruling classes. Spitzer, scion of a huge real estate dynasty (his father is worth half a billion, it’s estimated), is viscerally, instinctively loathed by New York’s power elite; Hank Greenberg, the octogenarian former AIG boss, said this week that he’s suing the guy. Weiner was an undistinguished legislator but a cunning political operator, trading in the Washington currencies of favors and quid pro quos. Whereas Spitzer, a hugely powerful AG, was almost wholly unsuited to the compromises of higher elective office and proudly advertised himself as “a fucking steamroller.”

The scandals weren’t so similar either. Spitzer committed a crime, while Weiner did not. Spitzer behaved as politicians have for centuries, and his hooker habit was distasteful but at least familiar. Weiner’s exclusively digital transgressions, by contrast, were newer and, to my mind, much creepier. They don’t even look alike, as this week’s jarring cover of New York magazine made clear – a dual portrait, riven down the middle, featuring Spitzer’s jutting chin and Weiner’s graying widow’s peak.

But if you went by the media coverage of the past couple of weeks, you could not fit an ultra-thin condom (or, in fairness to Weiner, perhaps a SIM card) between the two of them. Spitzer and Weiner, Weiner and Spitzer – the unfaithful Jews of greater New York! They have turned this election to one in which a married lesbian with a laugh like a foghorn seems nearly invisible, and pushed every other candidate into oblivion. Eliot and Anthony, with little effort, have made the New York race into a referendum on themselves. It’s now a reality show election – and after 12 years of Mike Bloomberg, whose billions have anesthetized us into political infants, that is probably all this city can handle.

Like any good reality show, we follow the ups and down of our candidates’ romantic lives, debating what’s up with Silda Spitzer and why Huma Abedin has stood by her man. (For pushing Weiner aside in favor of his wife, New York magazine wins a special prize: their reporter described her eyes as “pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent.”) We judge the legitimacy of their penitence – did Spitzer cry on Morning Joe? We trade wacky pictures of Weiner in hot orange trousers, or Spitzer buying organic honey at the greenmarket. What we do not do, any more than when Bristol Palin appears on Celebrity Wife Swap, is concern ourselves with policy. There, we all know, the fix is already in; a little sex comedy at least helps the medicine go down more easily.

It’s too soon to say that either man is headed back to office. This overwhelmingly blue city, where Democrats have a more than five-to-one advantage among registered voters, has nevertheless voted for a Republican or pseudo-Republican mayor five times in a row. (If you throw in the monstrous Ed Koch, who even got the Republican endorsement once, then eight out of the last nine mayoral elections have ended with a conservative at city hall.) But one thing seems certain: numbed into Bloombergian paralysis, New York can now only engage with politics in the thinnest of ways. If you want to win under these conditions, it is not enough to have a clear ideological orientation or a passel of endorsements or even a ton of cash. You need a made-for-TV story, and nothing sells like sex.

Leave it to Andy Borowitz, a hack who writes allegedly humorous fake news reports for the New Yorker – and whose perpetual position at the top of its most-read-online list stands as a daily insult to that magazine’s history – to make the numbingly obvious joke that, ha ha, Silvio Berlusconi is thinking about running for mayor too. Unsurprisingly, he was too oafish to see anything other than a sexual connection between the philandering Cavaliere and the real and digital philanderers of New York politics. Yet like a stopped clock or an idiot savant, Borowitz may have accidentally made a more astute observation than he realized. For New York, in these last twelve years, has become this country’s most vivid and depressing example of the practice of Berlusconismo: a combination of post-democratic politics and cynical entertainment that I’d argue is fast becoming the default system in the west, seen everywhere from the Britain of Boris Johnson to Putin’s Russia and Murdoch and Rinehart’s Australia.

These systems, New York’s and others, are democratic in the way that China is communist: they retain all of the formal elements of a democracy, but they don’t work that way at all. Instead, power is vested exclusively in a financial and media oligarchy, who are represented in the political sphere by clownish leaders who appear on television shows and other forms of light entertainment, the news very much included. Vote if you want; American Idol lets you vote too. Instead of abridging the right to vote or to protest, under Berlusconismo you maintain it – because those nominally democratic practices actually solidify, rather than contest, the elite’s hold on power. And as the political sphere turns into a reality show, even the few antagonistic figures become only entertainers.

Spitzer and Weiner, on paper, are nothing alike – but in this moment, every Spitzer becomes a Weiner at last, a punchline or a passing amusement. After twelve whole years in which this city has had no meaningful political debate, could it have been otherwise? Just like Italy, New York has spent far too long under the thumb of an ego-driven, corporatist, vertically challenged media billionaire (in fact, Bloomberg’s house in Bermuda – one of his fourteen properties – is right around the corner from Berlusconi’s), and now we are paying the price. The Eliot and Anthony reality show is the political disaster Bloomberg has bequeathed to New York, and while we may be walking all numb and exhausted this summer, the heat is only partially to blame. The real enervating spectacle is our sex farce of an election: a cheap summer thrill that, like all such thrills, leaves you afterwards feeling sick to your stomach.